Black out coming; Elon Musk says Starlink active in all continents even Antarctica
(www.ndtv.com)
❄️ INCLUDING ANTARCTICA ❄️
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I like Starlink, but I take issue with this statement..
This is what we in the trade call 'bollocks'. Information travels at the speed of light in a vacuum, the same as it does in a fibre optic cable.
Where it benefits is from a reduced number of devices between the endpoints which take a couple of milliseconds each to process and route the traffic - that doesn't actually mean the traffic travels faster, there's just fewer devices to slow it down as it moves across the network.
Light travels slower in glass (fiber optic cable) than it does in a vacuum. Additionally, the light bounces around in the fiber optic cable, rather than traveling perfectly straight. As you know, running zig zags across a road makes you run more distance, and therefore take longer, than running straight. Which represents further slowdown, even if light were traveling at the same speed in both mediums.
This is a well-known physical concept, that is provable at home, so you don't need to take (((their))) word for it.
You gotta love the Reddit style system we have here where openly wrong information that "feels" right is propped up, and a feedback loop of up-votes occurs. It makes you wonder how much patently wrong information you've consumed without verifying because you're not previously familiar with the topic enough to call bullshit.
The refractive index of light in fiber optics makes it almost 50% slower than in the vacuum. However the round trip distance to the satellite is likely longer, also the number of bits you can pump through the connection is dependent roughly on the log of the signal to noise ratio.
This puts the satellite at somewhat of a disadvantage due to propagation losses through space, in terms of total available bandwidth.
You are right. I'm not saying that that satellite is inherently faster than fiber optic cable. But neither is Starlink in that quote in the top comment. They're getting away with "technically the truth" non-sense that leaves out a crucial detail (what you described). Yes, the information travels faster, but it has to go a longer distance, so that point is moot.
But the top comment was still fundamentally wrong in its call-out, even if they sort of, kind of landed on the right conclusion (Starlink isn't faster than fiber).
Yup. Most people would prefer fiber optics directly to the home over starlink. The maximum available bandwidth is quite a bit larger I believe.
In fact just to get 500 Mbps you'd be paying $500 per month plus a pretty hefty install fee.
Most people can get 1Gbps for less than $200 if they have fiber.